


Nightfalling I

by chains_archivist



Series: Nightfalling by Jessica Harris [1]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: BDSM, Bloodsports, Boys in Chains, Coersive Sex, M/M, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-08
Updated: 2015-04-08
Packaged: 2018-03-21 21:54:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3705767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chains_archivist/pseuds/chains_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>by Jessica Harris</p><p>This began with the same story-germ that Bulletins from Bedlam did, but spun off into a much darker and more twisted tale. <br/>Warnings: This story contains some squick potential - bloodsports, and coercive sex, and violence, and all that nasty stuff. If this is not your cup of tea, (your vial of poppers?) steer clear.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nightfalling I

**Author's Note:**

> Note from Dusk, the archivist: this work was originally archived at [Boys in Chains](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Boys_in_Chains), which opened in 2000 as a multifandom archive for both fiction and art, but then sadly went offline in 2005. To bring the archive back, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in December 2014. Open Doors [posted an announcement](http://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/1832) and e-mailed all creators about the move, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this author, please [contact the Open Doors committee](http://transformativeworks.org/contact/open%20doors).  
> \--
> 
> Title: Nightfalling I By: Jessica Harris Disclaimer: they are still not mine. 
> 
> Rating: M/K, NC-17. 1/1 *WARNING!!* This story contains some squick potential - bloodsports, and coercive sex, and violence, and all that nasty stuff. If this is not your cup of tea, (your vial of poppers?) steer clear. 
> 
> Notes: This began with the same story-germ that Bulletins from Bedlam did, but spun off into a much darker and more twisted tale. A friend of one of my old housemates once said to me "You think everyone you know is either crazy or gay or both." To which I gave her the only possible answer - everyone I know *is* either crazy or gay or both. Welcome to my universe! 
> 
> Thanks to Spike and Nonie and Quercus for comments and encouragement, but I didn't really give them time for anything like final beta, so remaining bad stuff is mine. 
> 
> Feedback: Please please please. Even if it's flames, just so I know that people are actually *reading* this stuff.

"It's always night-time, now," Mulder thinks dreamily at the sheen of moonlight on leather that marks Alex's progress in front of him. "Always night-time, since I found you."   
  
Mulder knows that this is not, strictly speaking, true. The sun continues to rise in the morning, and he's back at work these days, he gets up and dons his suit and tie and goes about his daily business. But none of it's real, not his day-time business, not his day-time self, and he wonders how long it will take Scully to notice that he's not there behind his eyes anymore. The only thing that's real now is the compact form of the man before him and the night that he moves through - the black velvet skies, the halos of streetlights, the tang of the chill night air.   
  
Luckily night falls early in this northern port city. They're walking the scrubby parkland that borders the old harbour, and here away from the city lights the stars are bright in the sky. He can see the silhouettes of the container yards ahead of him, cranes and towers strange as skeletons against the horizon. In the distance a train whistle suddenly sounds. Mulder laughs. Perfect. Just too fucking *perfect*.   
  
"What's so funny?" asks Krycek.   
  
"Very atmospheric," says Mulder. "The train."   
  
"Christ!" says Krycek. "Would you just try and concentrate? These people are dangerous, and I don't want anything-" abruptly he stops.   
  
Mulder smiles fondly to himself. Alex doesn't want anything to happen to him? But something already has. Alex has. Alex took him. Touched him. Changed him.   
  
He doesn't remember the moment of being taken, but he's read his own case-file, pored over certain sections again and again, the way he's seen others reading verses from the bible. He'd disappeared, the Bureau thought, on a Friday; it had been Monday afternoon before they noticed his car in the corner of the parking garage, the keys still in the ignition and traces of blood on the inside of the door. It had taken them more than a month after that to find him, and he suspects that they didn't look very hard, really. He'd become an embarrassment to them.   
  
He remembers being found, though - the noise and the yelling, the splintering door as what seemed like hundreds of people had burst into the room. He'd been frightened, then, realising suddenly that Alex was really gone, that he was alone again. The plan had seemed sensible enough when Alex had first come up with it - it made things much easier to have him inside the Bureau for now, its resources his to exploit. But the reality was different, and he had screamed and wept and twisted in his bonds, trying to bury his face in the bed beneath him.   
  
It was just as well he'd reacted that way, in fact. It was more or less what they had expected. The doctors at the hospital found his later serenity unsettling, and eventually he'd had to invent some nightmares for them, manufacture some tears, just so they'd stop going on about denial and post-traumatic stress.   
  
The truth about his serenity is simpler than that. The truth is that Krycek made Fox Mulder disappear. And he found that he liked it, being gone. Nothing can touch him now, nothing but Alex and the pain and the pleasure that eat him up by night, swallow him and birth him out again, naked and wet and bloody and howling, helpless as a baby, his slate wiped clean. He liked it.   
  
"Stockholmed," he hears Scully's iciest tones in his mind "stockholmed to the *gills*!" He smiles fondly at that, too. He can appreciate her concern now in a way that he couldn't before, when it still mattered. She's probably right. But he doesn't care. Alex still acts sometimes like he doesn't believe this, like he thinks that Mulder might not come to him when called. Mulder doesn't know how to tell him there's no danger, that there isn't anywhere else he wants to be.   
  
Strictly speaking, he knows, he didn't find Alex. Alex found him. But he's beginning to believe that he'd been unconsciously searching for this, sending out invisible tendrils of need, and that when they touched Krycek they stuck and tangled and somehow reeled him in.   
  
Now Alex stops short and Mulder crashes into his back. Doesn't move away; stays pressed tight against him, the smells of cold leather and warm Alex making him sigh softly into the hollow behind Alex's ear. His hand is on Alex's hip, and the other man covers it with his own, warningly, protectively.   
  
"I can hear the ship," he mutters. "They're early!"   
  
* * *   
  
Mulder watches serenely as the alien bodies are unloaded off the ship. Once this would have filled him with emotion - desperate excitement, triumph, frustration at the world's willful blindness. Now he just rests against Alex's shoulder and watches quietly. This is, he's learned, one of the things that Alex's night-time has to offer - it's like a Dragon's cave here, the answers to all his questions gathered here like hoarded treasures, luminous in the darkness. The trade-off, though, is that here they stay; he can ask whatever questions he wishes, but the wonders he discovers can't travel into daylight with him. When they do, people start to die. And that still rattles his day-time self.   
  
Death in the night-time is easier, somehow. The blood soaks gently into the dark, the shadows absorb the fear, and the pain... the pain is just part of it, the pain opens the portals to this night, and for that it's to be endured. Even welcomed.   
  
He almost misses the pain of those first days as Krycek's prisoner. At first he'd thought he couldn't bear it, that he'd die. But gradually he'd learned what the pain had to offer, the way it burnt right through him, leaving him clean and empty inside. Pain is still meted out to him, of course, but Krycek has to be careful now, he can't leave too many marks, and it's not quite the same. With a shiver he remembers the day that Krycek had shown him his face in a mirror, the way that it had been so swollen and marked and battered that he'd been unrecognisable. And how good that had felt. To look in the mirror and not see himself.   
  
* * *   
  
Mulder watches calmly, but Krycek is tense and alert. His eyes flicker back and forth from the sailors carrying the body-bags, to the two men who wait on the ship, to Mulder at his side by the truck. He's got one hand hooked in the waistband of Mulder's jeans, and the gesture isn't merely affectionate. He's nervous about how this will affect Mulder, and he doesn't trust this apparent calmness.   
  
Mulder looks up at the sky where the thinnest of sickle moons hangs. "I like the moon like this," he whispers in Krycek's ear, "You can see that it's really a sphere, not just a flat disk in the sky. It looks more real this way." He flicks the edge of Krycek's ear with his tongue, and Krycek's urge to take him in his arms is so strong that it floods him with anxiety and he glances nervously again from the sailors to the watching men. "*Concentrate*!" he hisses at Mulder again, and tightens his grip on the back of his pants. He still can't quite believe this.   
  
He went a little crazy, he thinks, when he snatched Mulder. His instructions had been clear - "Hurt him," they'd said, "hurt him badly enough that he gives this up." And that was all he had intended to do. He just hadn't expected it to be so - so...   
  
Even in his own mind he can't find words for what it had been like, exactly, having Mulder there like that, the way it had made a strange wild pulse beat behind his eyes, lit a fire in his mind. The way that Mulder had somehow *changed* beneath his hands, like a bud peeled open until it's wet and sticky heart was forced open to the air.   
  
Somehow, beneath the blood on Mulder's contorted face, Krycek had caught a glimpse of something, a set of features familiar from the dreams he'd never let himself remember. It had knocked the breath right out of him, that face that was not quite Mulder's. Terrified him with the way its bones seemed to reveal the exact geometry of his desires.   
  
He'd stopped what he was doing, dropped his tools, and knelt down over Mulder's prone body, wiping the blood away, first with his gloved hands, then with his bare fingers. Then, as the madness truly took hold in him, with his mouth and tongue, licking it away.   
  
Heat that's half desire and half shame runs through him when he thinks about that night, remembering himself crouched like an animal over Mulder's body, exploring it inch by inch, searching with fingers, nose and tongue, teeth.   
  
He'd woken naked, stiff and sore and cold. His face was in Mulder's arm-pit, and there'd been blood beneath his fingernails, blood between his teeth. Still a little crazed, he'd grabbed the mirror from the cabinet and held it up to Mulder's swollen battered face, demanding "Look! Can you see it?"   
  
And Mulder had stared through livid slitted eye-lids at his own reflection, then smiled a crooked bleeding smile, and croaked:   
  
"Yes".   
  
And the mirror had dropped from Krycek's hands and his cock had risen and he'd fallen, literally fallen on Mulder, mind on fire again.   
  
And that had just been the start. Many of the traces were gone now. The FBI had capped Mulder's broken teeth and fixed the worst of the scars, and it was good work, they'd hired the best. But Krycek swears he can *taste* the difference in the artificial teeth, the grafted skin, and he knows where his signatures lie.   
  
The memories and the warm touch of Mulder's skin against his knuckles are distracting him, and his eyes flicker unseeingly over sailors, men, Mulder. The sailors are talking amongst themselves, and he risks letting go of Mulder, straining to hear the guttural Russian mutterings. Then something flies past his ear and Mulder is a blur of motion beside him, there are shots and shouting and he turns to see the men on the ship crumple, weapons falling from their hands. Mulder stands a few yards away, his gun still raised in a defensive pose.   
  
The sailors are staring at them, open-mouthed, and Krycek steps in, raises his own weapon, and shouts at them.   
  
"Don't do anything stupid! Finish loading the bodies on the truck!"   
  
* * *  
  
Krycek grits his teeth as the truck rattles over the backroads. He's disturbed at the openness of the Russian's attempt - the power of the consortium should have been enough to prevent such open betrayal. He wonders what back-room manoeuvrings have gone on in his absence, if somewhere along the way support has been withdrawn. The thought makes the back of his neck prickle.   
  
Mulder looks pensive as well, staring blindly out the window, gun still in his hand. "You OK?" asks Krycek, resting a hand briefly on his thigh.   
  
"I killed those men," says Mulder in an uninflected tone.   
  
"You saved my life," replies Krycek, and after a moment Mulder nods and falls silent again. Krycek files this away for future examination. Up ahead he can see the lights of the old fish-plant, their cargo's destination.   
  
* * *   
  
When he comes out of the bathroom at the hotel, Mulder is already naked. He's kneeling in the middle of the bed, and what he's holding in his hand makes Krycek's mouth go dry. It's an old straight razor, blade worn thin by years of use, handle a stained beige substance, maybe ivory, maybe bone. He looks up at Krycek and Krycek's stomach flips and tightens, his breath catches in his throat like a groan. Christ this scares the hell out of him, how much he's come to want this. He hadn't thought he had any illusions about himself to lose, but this... he'd never even have guessed. He wonders what he's turning into. Each new permission from Mulder takes him a little farther along this path, and he doesn't think he can find his own way back anymore. His head is pounding, looking at the razor in Mulder's hands, and he feels a flush travel up his chest.   
  
"Fuck," he says, "where did you *get* that thing, Mulder?"   
  
"It was my father's," says Mulder, and this time Krycek does groan, a deep guttural sound that he hardly recognises.   
  
"Oh god, Mulder, *you're* the psychologist here. *Tell* me how sick that is."   
  
But Mulder just keeps his gaze steady and holds the razor out to him, and Krycek's cock hardens helplessly behind his fly. There's a sound in his head like the wind.   
  
* * *   
  
The blade drags and catches against the grain of Mulder's skin, blood beading in the shallow scratches left behind. Krycek's hands are shaking with the effort of keeping the cuts shallow, mindful of the Bureau doctors and their frequent check-ups. Mulder's breath catches and hiccups in his throat, and he moves beneath the blade, away from it and then back towards it again, arching a little. 'Alex," he whispers, "please..."   
  
"I *can't*, Mulder," says Krycek desperately "You know I can't - the doctors - " but apparently he *can*, the blade has already slipped deeper, the wound pulls open and a thin ribbon of blood runs down Mulder's chest. Krycek lowers his mouth to it, shuts his eyes for a moment at the burst of copper-salt-iron on his tongue. There's a sour fear-sweat tang to both of them tonight, sharp in his nostrils, and he can feel the wetness rolling down his neck and sides. He raises the blade again, and Mulder pulls him down hard on top of him, shuddering deeply when the salt of Krycek's sweat hits his wounds.   
  
His voice is loud in Krycek's ears, and thinking of the thin hotel walls Krycek tries to stop Mulder's mouth with his own. This proves to be a mistake. Mulder's mouth opens beneath his and his thighs part to wrap around Krycek's waist, and this starts that wild breathless pulse in his head again. When Mulder opens to him like this it only spurs him on, makes him want to force him open further still. Coherent thought vanishes.   
  
When an external noise calls him back he's up Mulder's ass, without, he sickly suspects, any lube but his own cock's desperate leakings, and he's kissing Mulder as hard as he can, thumbs at the corners of his mouth and fingers digging into the hinges of his jaw as if this way he could pry his mouth open and climb right in. The razor is still clutched nervelessly in his hand, blade dangerously close to Mulder's eye. His throat feels rough, and he can only imagine how much noise they've been making. Shakily he draws away, and Mulder gives a mad little giggle and says "I think there's someone at the door."   
  
Heart racing, Krycek calls out "Just a minute," and pulls out as gently as he can. He throws on sweatpants and a bulky sweater, and scrubs briefly at his face with his hands, remembering blood against his lips. "Into the bathroom!" he says to Mulder, and walks to the door.   
  
Th man who stands there is in his sixties, stocky and muscular, his grizzled hair and beard clipped short. He looks at Krycek steadily and says "Everything all right here? I've had some complaints about noise."   
  
"Sorry," says Krycek. "my friend and I -" he struggles for a brief moment for something to explain the kinds of noises he fears they were making, "had a bit too much to drink - were having a bit of an argument - I'm sorry. It won't happen again."   
  
The man continues standing there. "I think I'd like to talk to your friend for a second," he says quietly. Krycek scrambles in his mind for some sort of excuse, and then from right behind him comes Mulder's voice saying "Sorry. But really, it's all right."   
  
Krycek turns to look at him and his heart sinks. Mulder has wrapped a couple of towels around himself but the hard jut of his cock is still evident and three long parallel scratches ooze blood vividly across his chest. His mouth is swollen and there's a smudge of blood across his upper lip like smeared lipstick. The professionally soothing smile he's wearing only makes it all look even more grotesque. The older man's nostrils flare and Krycek starts to reach for his weapon when Mulder catches his arm and smiles at the man, the blissful beatific grin that comes across the his face sometimes now. "Really," he says again "everything's fine." The man looks at him intently for what seems like long moments, then switches his gaze to Krycek. Finally, wordlessly, he nods.   
  
"Alright then. But no more noise. We have other guests. And I think you'd better find somewhere else for the rest of your stay. Please check out promptly in the morning."   
  
Then he leaves. "Come on," says Krycek shortly "we have to get out of here. He's going to call the police."   
  
"No he won't," says Mulder. "if he was, he would have done it already. He'll leave us alone. And besides-" he drops the towels to the floor, moves back to the bed - "I don't want to go. We're not finished here yet."   
  
His voice is flat and factual, but there is a dark certainty to it, and Krycek feels the first small stirrings of panic as he starts to wonder who is really in control here.   
  
* * *  
  
They leave before dawn the next morning, and the memory of that panic stays with Krycek even as they quietly pull the truck out. "Covert!" he bitches at Mulder, "You're familiar with the concept of covert, right? With remaining *inconspicuous*? And the way that does *not* include giving the locals an adventure that'll be all over town by noon!"   
  
He's berating himself as much as Mulder, and Mulder seems to know it, listening calmly as he inspects the thermos-like container on his lap.   
  
"Was the nursing-home arson a clean-up job," he suddenly asks, out of nowhere, "or did something else go wrong?"   
  
Krycek is taken aback. He's used to Mulder's questions by now, but they still make him nervous, and he hasn't said anything about the fire, or the nursing home. "What are you talking about?" he says to Mulder.   
  
Mulder smiles at him, an oddly sweet and innocent smile. "The bodies must have something to do with the hybrid project. Why else would you want me to contaminate the lab with this stuff? They're the next case scheduled to go through."   
  
Krycek is very still for a moment, then says flatly "It wasn't a clean-up job. Someone made a mistake."   
  
Mulder nods, and is silent. When Krycek looks over at him, he is delicately stroking his chest where the worst of the wounds lie, and squinting out the window at the pale northern sunlight that is just beginning to spill across the road. When Krycek touches his thigh, he smiles, then shuts his eyes.


End file.
